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| (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife) |
While meditating yesterday morning, I was reminded of the
first time I noticed how beautiful the world is. Do you remember the first time
that you thought something was beautiful? How old were you? I was taken back to
a time when I was five years old, waiting outside Knotty Oak School, the
elementary school my older sister had started attending and that I would enter
the following year. It was one of those warm, sunny, days in late spring when
the grass is the greenest and the sky so blue. Those days seem to be made for
five year olds (or the children within us no matter how old we are) don’t they?
Golden sunlight filtered down through the leaves of the small maples I stood
under and dappled the grass under my feet. Looking up through the leaves, I
suddenly realized how beautiful the world was and how peaceful and comfortable
I felt in my world. I just hadn’t noticed before.
Beauty is all around us, every day, in some form, but how
often do we notice? It can be as simple as the colors in our natural world, the
light that gleams in your child’s eyes, or a kind gesture from a stranger. Beauty
is not the gift. The gift is being able to perceive beauty. Whenever you have a
thought your body reacts with an electro-chemical reaction and produces a
polypeptide, an amino acid string that is the representation of your thought or
feeling. Those polypeptides are stored in the tissue of your body, so you not
only get to see beauty, but you also get to embody it, to carry it with you
wherever you go. First the beauty is in your world and you perceive it and then
it is in you and part of you.
Unfortunately, in order to see beauty you must also have the
power to see the ugliness around you. So if you see sadness, anger, violence,
then you embody that as well. It can’t be helped, it is just a a natural
reaction that whatever you see your body will react to accordingly. In our
world there is ugliness in many places. So what is the use of having this
marvelous gift of embodying what we see, if it is not only going to fill us
with beauty, but ugliness and sadness as well? Are we destined to be sponges
that just absorb whatever we come into contact with? The answer is that we have
another gift, the gift of choice. I am not advocating closing your eyes to the
world around you and trying to live with your head in the sand. But if you
change the way you perceive events and people, then the physical reaction will
change as well.
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| Beauty (Photo credit: Rickydavid) |
I am not suggesting that you give up any experiences or your
awareness, because you would not be who and what you are right now without each
and every experience that you have had. We don’t have the wisdom to know which
experiences will ultimately be positive and which will be negative. How many
times has what you thought was the right thing turned out to be the wrong
thing? Sometimes missed opportunities are blessings in disguise. We don’t always
know the whole plan for our lives, that is left up to our higher selves, our
Loved Ones who project us into this world.
Therefore, it is better to look at each experience as an
opportunity for growth and learning. When we no longer see any ugliness around
us, when our perception changes, then we no longer embody ugliness or give it a
place to reside. That may be the key to the spiritual belief that the opposite
of truth is not falsehood, it is actually nothingness. If you do not perceive
anything as ugly or bad, then it doesn’t have a place to reside, it ceases to
exist. It is just a matter of perception. And that, my loved one, is your other
wonderful gift, the gift of choice. When all you see is beautiful, then you
will be the embodiment of beauty. Beauty is all around you and the choice of
how you perceive it is yours.
Let’s keep living for peace, justice, and happiness, but
when we see the opposites of those goals, let us remember that they are not the
truth so they only exist in this domain as long as we allow them to be
here. They are not truth and only truth can exist in the domain of our
higher consciousness, our Loved Ones.
